

Thu, Mar 21
|Oakville Galleries in Centennial Square
Lunchtime Tour | Sung Tieu: Civic Floor
Visit our winter exhibition in Centennial Square and enjoy a free guided tour of Sung Tieu’s Civic Floor led by Exhibitions and Collections Manager Zana Kozomora.
Time & Location
Mar 21, 2024, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Oakville Galleries in Centennial Square, 1306 Lakeshore Rd E, Oakville, ON L6J 1L6, Canada
About the Event
Drawing upon extensive research, Sung Tieu produces works of sculpture, drawing, text and sound. Her work explores questions of governance, civic responsibility and justice, and analyzes mechanisms of state control.
Her research ventures into the quiet violence of bureaucratic systems in particular and how these systems impact people psychologically and emotionally. Her work has itself sometimes taken the form of reconstructions of sites of bureaucratic control and surveillance, even referencing her personal experiences with various administrative apparatuses.
The exhibition Civic Floor includes a new body of sculpture and wall-based works, which are accompanied by sound and video. In the exhibition, a series of steel sculptures makes reference to prison architecture from “radial" prisons first developed in the 1840s (and following the infamous Panopticon designs) to newer forms of prison architecture produced since the 1990s.
These sculptures give one an intimate view of the brutal mechanisms of spatial organization and surveillance methods designed in tandem with the architecture. Each sculpture also contains earth that references each prison's location. The sculptures are accompanied by wall-works based on documents used to assess individuals' eligibility for immigration and asylum or those that act as appeals against deportation or for refugees to apply for a 'waiver of grounds of inadmissibility'.
Image: Sung Tieu: Civic Floor on view at Oakville Galleries, Centennial Square. Photo: Jimmy Limit.